{"id":8139,"date":"2018-07-11T10:37:19","date_gmt":"2018-07-11T18:37:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/?p=8139"},"modified":"2018-07-11T13:31:47","modified_gmt":"2018-07-11T21:31:47","slug":"the-man-behind-the-infodump-denis-lynn-1947-2018","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/?p=8139","title":{"rendered":"The Man Behind the Infodump: Denis Lynn, 1947-2018."},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

There’s a chapter three-quarters of the way through Maelstrom<\/em>\u2014 “Mug Shot”, it’s called. It’s an executive summary of the apocalyptic microbe \u03b2ehemoth.\u00a0 It contains such gems as<\/p>\n

\u03b2ehemoth enters the cell via receptor-mediated endocytosis; once inside it breaks down the phagosomal membrane prior to lysis, using a 532-amino listeriolysin analog. \u03b2ehemoth then competes with the host cell for nutrients. Host death can occur from any of a several dozen proximal causes including…<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It goes on like that for almost four pages. Some might even say it stops the plot dead, but after two decades I still kinda like it. Maybe the issue it addresses would only ever occur to one reader in ten thousand\u2014 assuming I even had ten thousand readers\u2014 but that’s what makes this SF hard<\/em>, right? Respect for the science. Respect for the fine print. Coming up with cell entry via receptor-mediated endocytosis (thanks to its Blachford genes, \u03b2ehemoth can fool steroid receptors on the host cell membrane) is actually something to take pride in.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/a>

The man, and one infinitesimal sliver of his legacy.<\/p><\/div>\n

Or it would be, if I’d come up with it myself. As it is, I have to thank a dude called Denis Lyn for making me even think about it in the first place.<\/p>\n

Denis died a couple of weeks ago. Apparently he was collecting samples from a tide pool out on the west coast and a freak wave took him out, which makes no fucking sense whatsoever. He was 71.<\/p>\n

Denis assumed a faculty position at the University of Guelph about the same time I arrived there as a student. Rumors kicking around the department said that just a few years earlier he’d been a real hippie\u2014 hair down to his ass, marched on Washington at the height of the Viet Nam protests. By the time I met him, though, the man was Dr. Ciliate: he went on to be President of the International Society of Protistologists, and Editor-in-Chief of The Journal of Eukaryotic Microbiology. He was an impossibly nice, generous, helpful guy, strangely out of place in a department loaded with backstabbers and infighters. (At least one online memorializer remarked that they’d never heard Denis utter an unkind word about anyone. I can’t say the same; down at the St. Andrews field course one summer, upon hearing that UoG’s widely reviled president Donald “Ducky” Forster had snuffed it, Denis raised his beer and softly toasted “Ding dong, the Duck is Dead!”. Honestly, though, that only made me like him more.)<\/p>\n

I fell out of touch with him when I headed west to do my Ph.D. Fell out of touch with pretty much everyone else when political bullshit sent me screaming from academia entirely.\u00a0 But Denis looked me up when the release of Starfish<\/em> was imminent\u2014 a mutual friend had pointed him to the first home-built edition of this very website\u2014 and I, of course, didn’t hesitate to ask if I could pick his brain about the sequel. And of course he said yes. And his responses to my (frankly na\u00efve) thoughts about my fake microbe were, well…<\/p>\n

… what happens once the vesicle is internalized?\u00a0 Usually, these vesicles are destined for the GERL pathway (Golgi, Endoplasmic Reticulum, Lysosome) and end up fusing with lysosomes and digestion occurs.\u00a0 Can B subvert the signal molecules on the outside (=cytoplasmic side) of the vesicle so that the vesicles don’t fuse with lysosomes?\u00a0 This would be a trick much like Toxoplasma<\/em> uses to survive in the parasitiphorous vesicle…<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

…detailed.\u00a0 The man also sent me a free copy of Lodish et al<\/em>‘s Molecular Cell Biology<\/em>\u2014 a real doorstop, 1400 pages. Twenty years later I still use it.<\/p>\n

Denis’s last email to me was sent on January 21, 2002. \u00a0It ends: “P.S. I wouldn’t turn down a beer even in the daytime, but NOT BEFORE 1130h.”<\/p>\n

I don’t remember if we ever had that beer. All I know is, that’s the last documented contact I had with him. After that he retired from Guelph, moved to the west coast, became an adjunct professor at UBC. And got killed, absurdly, by a stupid wave while sampling stupid mussels from a tide pool, leaving our species\u2014 by his absence\u2014 just a tiny bit more deserving of extinction.<\/p>\n

I can’t claim to have ever been close to the man. That’s kind of my point, though; far as he was concerned I was just another dumb student passing through the system\u2014 ultimately, someone who didn’t even stay<\/em> in the system\u2014 and still he bent over backward to lend a hand. He was that way to everyone. Now that he’s gone, I think it’s kind of cool that a teensy bit of his essence has been uploaded into Maelstrom<\/em>.<\/p>\n

And if you find that maudlin, well, I can just say fuck you<\/em>. Because Denis Lynn never would.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There’s a chapter three-quarters of the way through Maelstrom\u2014 “Mug Shot”, it’s called. It’s an executive summary of the apocalyptic microbe \u03b2ehemoth.\u00a0 It contains such gems as \u03b2ehemoth enters the cell via receptor-mediated endocytosis; once inside it breaks down the phagosomal membrane prior to lysis, using a 532-amino listeriolysin analog. \u03b2ehemoth then competes with the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8139","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-eulogy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8139","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8139"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8139\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8147,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8139\/revisions\/8147"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8139"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8139"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8139"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}